Google Acquires Kaggle!

Kaggle is a platform for analytics competitions and for prognostic modeling. This innovative company was founded in 2010 and since then has come a very long way and currently employ a vast network of almost half a million scientists who pioneer in data science. According to reports, Kaggle has managed to accumulate a staggering $12.5million over a span of 6 years and only time will tell how this versatile company will evolve.

Kaggle basically employees a crowd sourcing approach which allows them to evaluate countless strategies that can be used to predict and analyze data modeling tasks. This gives them a whole array of strategies and techniques for predictive modeling. This company has dominated the market due to its specific niche target of predictive modeling using crowd sourcing, it has been hailed as the new face of research and development. Their steady progress in democratization of data has not gone unnoticed as Google has recently announced that they are acquiring Kaggle for an undisclosed amount!

According to Google, the idea behind this acquisition is to help reduce the barriers of entry to artificial intelligence and provide a platform for the largest community of developers to hone and demonstrate their skills in data modeling tasks. Google aims to provide Kaggle with their Google cloud and libraries to help them create the largest developer community. Previously Kaggle and Google had integrated to work a crowd sourcing program of allowing developers to decode YouTube video algorithms and classifying the videos. This program allowed Google to gain insight on how Kaggle operates and apparently they were very impressed as they have ended up acquiring this versatile company.

How do Kaggle Crowd Sourcing Programs Work?

Essentially Kaggle hosts prepare the related data and an extensive description of the problem. They also create a framework for the program and anonymize the data. They then integrate a winning prize into the framework to provide the developers with monetary motivation. Once the framework and winnings have been established, participants are then allowed to experiment using different techniques to create the most effective model.

Participants have to compete against each other to help inspire new ideas and submissions of models are done through scripts. After the deadline, each module is graded and the winner is announced who is then called for an interview for vacant roles in their company. Once the winner is announced, Kaggle will provide the participant with prize money in exchange for the intellectual property that they have developed in the competition.

How will Kaggle Operate now after the Recent Acquisition?

Many people are concerned that this recent acquisition will affect the business model of Kaggle but these people can rest assured as Google will allow Kaggle to operate independently. Kaggle will now have the Google cloud and Google libraries at their disposal which will allow them to combine the largest data science community with the largest machine learning cloud. This is no doubt an exciting news as Google will provide Kaggle with a powerful infrastructure, deployment services and query enormous data sets. It is safe to say that this acquisition will help Kaggle take their goal of reducing the barriers of entry in artificial intelligence to new horizons!